I rarely say much these days about teaching, and I suppose that’s due in part to the peculiarity of the entire adjunct-in-a-foreign-environment situation.  Being an adjunct is simply weird enough, but compound it with a foreign system (note that “foreign” here means foreign to me) and you feel remarkably like you’re walking through a carnival fun house in someone else’s shoes.

But I find myself wondering about students now and then, and their expectations of educational programs, education in general, and us as teachers in particular.

One of the classes I just finished with required 4 novels over a 16 week period, a short essay of 1200 words, and a final exam.  Not much, truth be told, but it’s not my course.  And I suppose that’s another part of the reason I don’t talk much about teaching;  very little of what I’m doing is actually my own course design these days, and I miss that incredibly.

However, while I’m accustomed to students complaining about the workload, a recent conversation caught me off guard simply because of its blatancy.  The student hadn’t read the last novel, and had no intention of doing so.  S/He’d attended the lecture and therefore “knew what the story was about.”

Right.

It was useless to explain that the lectures only provide context and analysis issues, and certainly don’t cover everything in the novel, although I did try.  I even resorted to the “you probably won’t manage the exam if you don’t read the text” desperate appeal, but since the student had cleared an earlier exam without having read the text, it wasn’t precisely convincing.

I don’t know which is more distressing:  the idea that a student actually COULD pass an exam without having read a text (and no, it wasn’t my exam), or the fact that a student registers for a sophomore/junior-level literature class with no intention of  reading the literature.  “I’m studying literature.  Just tell me what the story says; I don’t have to read it.”

There’s something horribly wrong with that discussion, and I find myself torn between frustration, incredible irritation, and a certain depression.  The latter because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it; it’s neither my system nor my course.

Sigh.

Getting OFF the soapbox and moving on to fibery stuff, you’ll have to wait for fleece until the next installment.  I’m determined to get off the computer for a couple of hours tonight and do a bit of spinning.  But I do have a  little to show you.

First, I promised to teach a class of about 47 students (in 3 groups, I think) to spindle.  It’s just an orientation, and is the primary reason why I’ve been spinning a few funky and novelty yarns.  And yes, I have a couple to show you, but first there’s dyeing.  Allowing 2 ounces of fiber per student, there’s six pounds of Brown Sheep mill ends roving from Carol Lee at The Sheep Shed Studio.  It’s perfect fiber for this kind of thing; it’s cheap enough that no one is traumatized if it ends up fairly well destroyed, but has a good handle and makes for a nice yarn.  It’s great for training and getting new folks started, and I’ll admit I’ve worked my way through about 15 pounds of it for just that purpose.  The only drawback to the mill ends rather than the regular rovings is that the roving isn’t necessarily consistently wide; some sections are thinner than others.  But it still works, and the kids will do fine with it.

Scott (their teacher) told me that they seem to be into bright colors at the moment; he noticed that as they got into their weaving segment. I took him seriously.

This is a fairly bad photo; I couldn’t find a place to photo all of it where there was halfway decent light! And you certainly don’t get a sense of the scale of things, but there are 87 braids there, and each braid is made up of a 6-foot long or longer length of roving. MOST of the colors are done in batches of 10, except for the crayon-rainbow batches, and I think there are about 20 of them. There is ONE subtle, earth-tones batch just to show that all fibers don’t have to be glow-in-the-dark shades.

We have a pepto-pink with splashes of yellow (which don’t show in the photo):

There’s a flame orange with splashes of yellow (which also doesn’t show), the brown, and an orange (which should have been red) with splashes of pepto-pink:

A slime green (much brighter than here) with splashes of blue:

A blue with splashes of red and purple, and a host of primary-color rainbow fibers:

and

and

And last, a yellow and purple (which looks like black/navy in this photo):

Whew!

Do you reckon they’ll be happy? At least this gives them a choice! Or several.

I have, however, realized that braids are truly horrible ways to show fiber. It’s impossible to see how the colors pattern themselves across a roving; you only get a sense of the colors and not the structure of those colors. Normally I wrap the bundles into birds’ nests, but transporting 87 nests is a lot messier than transporting 87 braids. So, for the sake of organization, you’ll have to settle for the braids.

Spinning has been a bit eclectic, and the goal has been to gather enough of a variety of yarns to be able to show the students (teens, remember) that there are options and handspun yarn can look like any number of things—and need not look like rag yarn if you don’t want it to. So, in addition to what’s already in the stash, I’ve run up these . . .

First, I realized I had no singles in my stash. Everything is plied. I know why I don’t; I don’t want to have to worry about skewed fabric or finding a pattern specifically for those yarns. I’m lazy. But I need to at least show them that you CAN spin a single and, given certain considerations, knit with it. So first there was this:

This is Icelandic, hand-dyed by Spunky Eclectic in “Snow Squall.” It’s spun a bit thick-thin, as softly as possible, and for a total of 271 yards.

And then there was this:

This is another Spunky Eclectic fiber club fiber. It’s Romney, hand-dyed in the “Goblin Eyes” colorway. There are 8 ounces and 244 yards, and I deliberately spun it thick-thin. The dye work is lovely here, and the photo doesn’t do it justice. The colors look like velvet and are much richer in real life.

Both singles are low-twist and as softly spun as I could manage. Much to my surprise, I found that the Icelandic needed more twist than I expected—and fulled much more readily than I expected. Only a bit of grace and a lot of luck saved me from having a felted mass for that one, and determined to get it right, I span and fulled the Romney next. It came out nearly perfectly. The Icelandic, on the other hand, has three knots in the skein simply because I underestimated how much twist was actually necessary and then had to reconnect. That’ll teach me to get cocky!

Then, however, things got funky. First I ran up this:

Four ounces of Spunky’s “Pie for Everyone” Falkland. (Are you seeing a theme here?) It’s plied with Anchor’s glitter viscose crochet cable yarn/thread, decidedly thick-thin, and there are 46 yards.

Then I used the other half of “Pie for Everyone” to do this:

It’s a thick-thin, plied back on itself with feathers, felted balls, and silk fabric. I suspect the silk bled a wee bit and is the reason the yarn is a bit more mauve than the other “Pie,” but I don’t mind it. There are 71 yards.

And finally, a simple, dignified novelty yarn.

I had about 4 ounces of a red superwash, so plied it with metallic thread and sequins for a worsted-weight very soft yarn with a bit of glitz and glitter. This one actually surprised me a bit, but I rather like it. For the record, the WPI = 12, and TPI is about 7. There are 131 yards; enough for a scarf of some sort eventually.

And that, friends and neighbors, is the last of my novelties for a little while.  The rest of the week is going to be spent indulging in fleece.  Lovely fleece.

This week’s readings:
1. Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine”;
2. excerpt; Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks;
3. student blogs.

Every class is different, and this one is no exception to that rule. There are 17 students, it’s a fully online class, and there were 133 posts to the introductions forum alone. They’re an eclectic group, with a surprisingly high percentage of psych majors, and I’ve been really impressed with their willingness to tackle the questions and topics. They may not always like a text, but they’ve been exceptional about preventing that dislike (or conversely, like) from blindsiding them into groundless opinion without foundation or even comprehension of the text. That’s unusual. Many students decide they don’t like a text—often because it doesn’t meet their expectations of what “story” should be—and automatically shut it down without seeing whether it has anything to offer.

This group is working hard to avoid that.  I’m impressed.

I realized the other day that it’s been almost two weeks since I’ve posted, and it’s time to catch up.

Things have been busy with a lot of cleanup from last fall and some startup for this term, but there’s been some fallout, too.

General Academics/Teaching

I had an interesting conversation with a teacher a little while ago, and I find it still bothers me. The gist of it was that “good students will do well; poor students won’t.” The context was the Norwegian university environment, where required activity and participation is nearly nonexistent. Students nigh well operate in a sort of “independent study” approach, with one large lecture per week, and limited 45-minute small groups which meet once each week for part of the term. Attendance at lectures and small groups is voluntary, and grades are established by a single final exam at the end of the term. The recent budget cuts have made a system which provides little structure to its students even more unstructured; it requires even less of them. Students who have good study and academic work skills when they come into this environment will do the extra work and will at least survive; those who come ill-prepared, however, will struggle and may well fail.

That statement bothers me for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is simply a fallacy to assume that students come to college or university already established as students. While we can place the responsibility for study skill development on the student’s shoulders to a certain extent, we cannot assume that all students have high quality—or even sufficient—or equal degrees of preparation. They are certainly not carbon copies of one another with the same educational, environmental, familial, and personal backgrounds. Equally problematically, working under this attitude does not allow good students to hone existing skills, or poor students to learn how to become good students. In essence, it throws away the poor students before they ever arrive on the college’s doorstep.

I have a problem with that. In my own experience, students come to college moderately clueless about what they’re getting into. They shape their understanding of the environment and the new interactions and the new requirements within that first academic year. Only then do they really begin to grasp the planet on which they’ve landed themselves. It strikes me that to not provide the structure to help them make that adjustment is both shortsighted as well irresponsible on our (academia’s) part. College is not high school in a new location. It is certainly all part of the academic family, but making the shift is a learning experience all its own, and I firmly believe that if we want to encourage success in our students, we need to lay the groundwork. If we do not, then “poor students won’t do well”—but the fault will be as much ours as anyone’s.

This Week’s Reading

“Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton, Magret by Anne Karin Elstad (the second in the Folket på Innhaug series; in Norwegian), Eldest by Christopher Paolini, and The Care and Feeding of Spinning Wheels by Karen Pauli. How much more eclectic can one get? (By the way, the Eragon movie? If you read and liked the book, don’t waste your time with the film; it’s a waste and a terrible shame given the rich potential of the written text. The only folks who seem to like it are those who’ve not read the book.)

Writing

Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Anne B. Ragde—author of Berlinerpoplene, Arsenikktårnet, and a host of other things—while she talked about her writing and herself as writer. One of the things that particularly caught my attention was what she believed were the key elements to any good fiction: motor og troverdighet, or drive and believability. There must be something which makes you turn the page, and you’ve got to be able to buy into that story. This is something I’ve tried to explain to younger writers, and it’s something we have to work at incorporating in our own work. What we say may be interesting but there must, after all, be a point. There must be a reason why we thought this particular story was important enough that we needed to write it—and important enough that our reader should read it.

“Believability” is a flexible concept, but equally important. While what we might believe changes from text to text based on our expectations of that text, we still have to be able to accept that characters behave the way they do, or that circumstances are and become what they are, and we have to care about those characters. The moment we stop caring or believing, that’s the moment we put the book or story down—and at that point the writer has failed.

I was pleased to see how solidly Anne B. understood those concepts—I would have been surprised had she not—but I appreciated too her sense of her writing as both work and craft. I think this is something that comes with time, but I’ve yet to see a successful writer who doesn’t make these very basic concepts a part of his or her writing identity.

Knitting

There’s been precious little of that happening since the legwarmers were finished. What there has been is:

Spinning

Since I finished that first test bit of spinning, I’ve been slowing working my way through some 3 ounces of Cormo roving. I have to admit that I like that wool! It’s very soft, and while I know my spinning hasn’t done it justice, even the finished yarn is soft and squishy despite a good amount of twist. I still have to work on consistent thickness and keeping my joins from turning into blooming blobs (literally), but I can look at this skein and see a real difference between it and that first test spin a few weeks ago.

It was not, however, a completely painless process. I really missing having a warm body at hand to point out when I’m screwing up or overlooking something which more experienced folks would do automatically or consider common sense. As my favorite Chief Master Sergeant once told me, “The problem with greenhorns isn’t that they don’t know enough to ask questions. The problem is that they don’t know enough to know what questions to ask.” That said, the reality is that I’m just a stubborn wench determined to figure things out, so I really don’t mind stumbling into things. If nothing else, it makes the learning process entertaining.

For instance, did you know that you should stop your single when you have a bit less than half the amount to fill your plying surface? You did? Ah, then you sorry bugger, why didn’t you tell me? (grin) In the process of spinning those three ounces, I cleverly (I thought) joined every new spindle-full to the end of the previous one, ending with roughly 200 yards of a single single. Since I wanted to make a large skein with no knots and as few joins as possible, I thought that was rather clever. I loved my long single, admittedly in part because it gave me a chance to even out the twist over longer lengths. The problem is that there is no way to fill your plying surface and keep plying without breaking the yarn and starting with a new batch. Once the spindle or bobbin is filled, you have to cut it and start again. Of course, if you only have one spindle and no wheel, that makes the problem even more annoying.

Coming to that realization was an adventure. I tried moving my singles from the spindle to nøstepinde to spindle and back, then to a combination of both, then to a center-pull ball. The house looked like a scene from Arachnophobia; singles were spun everywhere, and nothing—not even DH—risked moving. Thanks to some good advice, I finally understood that what I was trying to do was frankly impossible and that I needed a bigger plying surface. In other words, I needed a bigger spindle.

I improvised a CD spindle on a 24″ shaft using a 3/8″ dowel, a couple of CDs, some foam packing wrap (no grommet), and lots of tape. Ugly as sin, spun badly, wasn’t exactly ergonomic, but it worked. I unplied the several yards I’d already plied and then got busy. A few hours later and thanks to a couple of chairs, some miscellaneous furniture and body parts, a couple of dowels from two disassembled paper-towel holders, a yarn swift, a pot, and one entertained hubby, I had tightened the formerly-plied singles and plied the entire length with the CD spindle. I set the twist last night and hung the skein to dry, and I have to tell you that I’m pleased with my progress. I have another four ounces of Cormo to spin, and we’ll see how it compares with this first batch.

Wanna see?

I didn’t measure it, but based on what came off the yarn swift (oh, yes; it came out to play too), there should be somewhere around or above 75 yards.

For gauge context, there’s a dime on the left, and a Norwegian 1-kroner piece on the right.

You can see where I struggled with consistency because those areas bloomed more than the finer strand around them. In most cases, those were places where I joined the fiber. It’s something I need to work on.

On other fronts, MIL has decided I should use her grandmother’s old wheel. I don’t have much history, but I do have a little. MIL knows that her grandmother bought the wheel at a farmer’s market type of event (Martnan) in the Skogn area (Norway) in 1881, and that it was used when it was bought–which means that it’s older than that purchase date. She has no idea how old it was when her grandmother bought it, and I have no way to guess at it. A valuator would be able to figure it out, but all I have to go on is that conditions in Norway at that time weren’t great, and possessions–especially tools–were definitely not considered “disposable.” That means that the wheel could have been anywhere between a couple of years old or much older, and sold for economic reasons, or because the original owner died and the family either didn’t want or couldn’t keep it. The last option is less likely than the first given the Norwegian tendency to keep “arvegods” (inherited items) in the family.

The wheel isn’t in the best shape; it’s going to need a lot of work. The leather bearings are gone or need to be replaced, the footman needs to be replaced, the treadle is cracked, the wooden nails are slipping out of the wheel and need to be tightened, one maiden is broken, and the flyer is missing. All of those things are actually no big problem given a carpenter/woodworker, except for the missing flyer. The odds are that it was broken and then thrown out without someone realizing what it was, but I think we can find a similar wheel in the area and build a replacement. With luck, the neighbor—who happens to be a master carpenter/woodworker—will be interested in taking on the challenge. Cross your fingers.

13 Jan UPDATE: The neighbor did indeed agree to see what he could do. Even if the wheel never again spins properly, at least it’s now in safe hands and a part of DH’s family heritage will be preserved. That alone counts for something.